


Flaming Youth

by omg_wtf_yeah



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Slash, Season/Series 02-03 Hiatus, Subtext
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-05
Updated: 2011-06-05
Packaged: 2017-10-20 04:26:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/208722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omg_wtf_yeah/pseuds/omg_wtf_yeah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quinn runs a fever at school, Rachel helps, they fight and they make up. Season two spoilers. Quinn/Rachel preslash, past Quinn/Finn, current Rachel/Finn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flaming Youth

Quinn’s eyes were burning, red-rimmed and dour as she blankly stared down the hallway. That day was another rainy day in a sequence of rainy days that had blanketed Lima in a heavy shroud of gloom, all of which were sucky and annoying and required constant attention to keep her pony slick and straight. Tina and Mercedes’s mile-a-minute chatter at the lockers beside her felt like an icepick in her already abused ears, so consequently, it felt like every crappy part of her head was fuzzy-hurting-capital-S Suck. She groaned, turning around and dropping her forehead to the blessedly cool metal of her locker door.

“You don’t look good.” The voice was bright, clipped, and annoyingly effervescent. Rachel Berry.

Quinn turned her head sluggishly, fixing a narrow, baleful look on the other girl. “Gee, thank you,” she retorted, voice thick with sarcasm and nasal with a stuffy nose.

Rachel was typically up-and-at-’em, standing, pert and perfect in one of her trademark bunny sweaters and crisp, pleated skirts, books clasped to her chest and hair shiny and smooth despite the humidity. The overheads were practically refracting off of her shininess. “Well,” she said, rolling her eyes around in Disney-cute, “what I mean is…,” she floundered, “…you don’t look good.”

Quinn gave up on glowering and just closed her eyes, the darkness behind her eyelids wonderfully soothing. “Sick,” she muttered into the crook of her elbow, “so you can go away and bother someone else.”

She could see Rachel’s knees bobbing closer. “I never get sick. You should do what I do – religiously wipe your locker, desks, chairs, book bag, and lunch tray with sanitizer wipes and power up on industrial grade vitamin C horse tablets. They’re for horses. I bulk order mine from a company in Guam, where strenuous FDA guidelines can’t dictate the safe daily human allowances of vitamin C. Technically, one dose is an eighth of a tablet. But I like to play it safe, so I always take two. Better safe than sorry. I have to protect my voice after all.”

“You sound like a squirrel on speed,” Quinn growled into her sweater.

Rachel’s voice was respectfully soft. “It’s the vitamin C. One of the side-effects is manic spikes of hyperactivity. That and mild hallucinations. I…think it aids my performances.”

“It’s your suck,” Quinn unintelligently shot back. Then she groaned again, her fight and her annoyance bleeding out of her all at once. She was too miserable to hold onto anger.

“Are you going to go to the nurse?”

“Why?” Quinn asked. Her blue eyes opened and focused on her locker door. Her voice went low. “They’d only send me home…and there’s no one at home if I went.”

“Yes,” Rachel said, her voice coming closer.

A soft hand fell on Quinn’s shoulder and Quinn started, looking at the other girl in surprise. Rachel’s brown eyes were velvety and sweet. Quinn thought fleetingly that if she was surrounded with that kind of warm, comforting darkness, her temples wouldn’t ache so badly.

“But you should go anyway.” Rachel lowered her chin and looked at Quinn through the fringe of her eyelashes. “It’ll make you feel better.” Quinn considered it for a moment, an indefinable feeling rising up in her – she must be hysterical from suffering. Rachel’s hand curled into Quinn’s where it was pressed to the cool locker. “Come on, I’ll walk you.” She sounded so sure and so confident, Quinn didn’t resist when she began to pull her toward the nurse’s office.

Quinn walked quietly behind Rachel, her blue eyes on the scuffed laminate floor and her head stuffed with the din of the hallway and her overall congestion. It felt unexpectedly nice, being buoyed by another person, towed along by Rachel Berry’s hand. Her eyes burned, her vision going filmy, and she realized that it had been a long time since she’d really felt taken care of – like someone else would watch out for her. It had her kind of regretting all the nasty things she’d done to Berry, except for the times Rachel really had it coming.

Rachel pushed open the door to the office and reported to the put-upon secretary that Quinn was there to see the nurse. “And here we are,” Rachel said, walking Quinn inside the nurse’s office. It was empty in there, the nurse’s desk vacant. “I think she’s only out for a minute.”

Quinn arched an eyebrow at Rachel for narrating what the secretary had said not moments before. “Oh really?” she asked. “What could have given you that idea?”

Rachel led Quinn over to one of the cots behind the curtain, dropping her books off on the table as she passed it. “No need to be snippy,” she said as she pressed Quinn to sit.

“ _No_ ,” Quinn argued, “I don’t want to lie down!”

“It will make you feel better, I swear,” Rachel insisted, pushing Quinn’s shoulders down.

Quinn growled as her spine curled against then relaxed into the mattress. Her head swam as she lay down but her aching joints felt better when she was horizontal. Sighing, she flipped her skirt down and smoothed it over her legs. The cool air of the clinic raised goosebumps on her bare skin. She pulled her sweater (was it Finn’s or Sam’s? She couldn’t remember) tighter across her body and laid her arm over her damp, hot forehead.

Rachel plucked at the pillow under Quinn’s head, centering it with that anal-retentive attention to detail she so often exhibited. “Now that’s better, isn’t it?” Rachel asked, smiling down at her.

“Why are you doing this for me?” Quinn whispered. Her blue eyes narrowed. “When I’ve been nothing but horrible to you? No one’s this nice.”

Rachel’s smile faltered and came back stronger, less shiny and more thoughtful. “Because we’re teammates,” she answered softly, her fingers playing on the edge of the bed linen, “and because we’re friends.”

Quinn arched an eyebrow. “Are we?” she asked.

“Yes,” Rachel came back, her tone firm. Then she shook her head, dropping her gaze. “At-at least I think we are.”

“You stole my boyfriend,” Quinn reminded her sharply.

“ _Yes_ , but you stole him first.”

“I didn’t _steal_ him! He was _mine_ in the first place. If anything, I was _reclaiming_ stolen property!” Quinn’s voice boomed in the empty room, her congested chest tight with frustration, annoyed all over again by this competition with Berry she could never win. She hadn’t started really wanting Finn until someone else had him – to her, he was like a blunt instrument, good for a purpose like most boys were but bad for much else besides it – but losing him to Rachel had felt like a knife in her back. Rachel, as annoying as she was, as perennially unpopular as she was, as contested and criticized as she was sometimes by the glee club, was competition more than any dim bulb with blonde hair and an iota of gymnastic talent Quinn had met in the Cheerios. She was everything Quinn wasn’t, everything that Quinn couldn’t be. She had a talent and a destiny that transcended the Lima city limits. She was beautiful and talented and _loved_. If Quinn could only claim a fraction of what Rachel Berry didn’t even know she had…

“Let’s not fight about this,” Rachel said softly. She raised her eyes and met Quinn’s arch gaze. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

Quinn stared at her for a long time, remorseful and annoyed by the penitence Rachel Berry’s unhappy expression cultivated in her. She drew one knee up and put her arm back over her forehead to block out some of the overhead light. She dropped her head back and swallowed, wetting her lips. “Okay,” she muttered. “Let’s not fight.” She cracked her eyes open and saw Rachel Berry smile.

“Good. I appreciate that. It’s very…fair-play of you.”

Quinn couldn’t help smiling at Rachel’s silly, high flown grown-up-isms. She looked unhappy, conflicted, almost as miserable as Quinn felt, but Quinn was getting used to her own sympathetic reaction to Rachel’s moue by then (you can’t spell Sympathetic without _Pathetic_ , Coach Sylvester would disgustedly rap out).

“I should…,” Rachel said, throwing a glance toward the door. She gave a pert, false smile. “So…so feel better soon.” She turned to go with a nod and Quinn’s hand shot out, grasping Rachel’s – it must be the fever, because Quinn didn’t even know she was going to do it before she had. Rachel looked down at Quinn’s fingers wrapped around her palm, her eyebrows under the fringe of her bangs. Her dark eyes met Quinn’s.

“Thank you,” Quinn said softly.

For a moment, Rachel stared at her with gloomy confusion, her eyebrows furled. Then the corners of her mouth twitched up and she smiled feelingly. “You’re welcome,” she said.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the [Running Hot: Multifandom Fever Fic Commentfic Meme](http://ariadnes-string.livejournal.com/81197.html), because after I initially posted this prompt, I got the idea for this story. Since _Glee_ isn't my main fandom, I hope all of this looks in order. ;)
> 
> The title comes from the song _Fever_.


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